-721-
Most of the philosophers of the French Revolution combined science with beliefs associated with Rousseau. Helvétius and Condorcet may be regarded as typical in their combination of rationalism and enthusiasm.
Helvétius ( 1715-1771) had the honour of having his book De l’Esprit ( 1758) condemned by the Sorbonne and burnt by the hangman. Bentham read him in 1769 and immediately determined to devote his life to the principles of legislation, saying: “What Bacon was to the physical world, Helvétius was to the moral. The moral world has therefore had its Bacon, but its Newton is still to come.” James Mill took Helvétius as his guide in the education of his son John Stuart.
Following Locke’s doctrine that the mind is a tabula rasa, Helvétius considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction. Genius, he maintains, is often due to chance: if Shakespeare had not been caught poaching, he would have been a wool merchant. His interest in legislation comes from the doctrine that the principal instructors of adolescence are the forms of government and the consequent manners and customs. Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
In ethics, Helvétius was a utilitarian; he considered pleasure to be the good. In religion, he was a deist, and vehemently anti-clerical. In theory of knowledge, he adopted a simplified version of Locke: “Enlightened by Locke, we know that it is to the sense-organs we owe our ideas, and consequently our mind.” Physical sensibility, he says, is the sole cause of our actions, our thoughts, our passions, and our sociability. He strongly disagrees with Rousseau as to the value of knowledge, which he rates very highly.
His doctrine is optimistic, since only a perfect education is needed to make men perfect. There is a suggestion that it would be easy to find a perfect education if the priests were got out of the way.
Condorcet ( 1743-1794) has opinions similar to those of Helvétius, but more influenced by Rousseau. The rights of man, he says, are all deduced from this one truth, that he is a sensitive being, capable of making reasonings and acquiring moral ideas, from which it follows that men can no longer be divided into rulers and subjects, liars and dupes. “These principles, for which the generous Sydney gave his life and to which Locke attached the authority of his name, were
-722-
afterwards developed more precisely by Rousseau.” Locke, he says, first showed the limits of human knowledge. His “method soon became that of all philosophers, and it is by applying it to morals, politics, and economics, that they have succeeded in pursuing in these sciences a road almost as sure as that of the natural sciences.”
Condorcet much admires the American Revolution. “Simple common sense taught the inhabitants of the British Colonies that Englishmen born on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean had precisely the same rights as those born on the meridian of Greenwich.” The United States Constitution, he says, is based on natural rights, and the American Revolution made the rights of man known to all Europe, from the Neva to the Guadalquivir. The principles of the French Revolution, however, are “purer, more precise, deeper than those that guided the Americans.” These words were written while he was in hiding from Robespierre; shortly afterwards, he was caught and imprisoned. He died in prison, but the manner of his death is uncertain.
He was a believer in the equality of women. He was also the inventor of Malthus’s theory of population, which, however, had not for him the gloomy consequences that it had for Malthus, because he coupled it with the necessity of birth control. Malthus’s father was a disciple of Condorcet, and it was in this way that Malthus came to know of the theory.
Condorcet is even more enthusiastic and optimistic than Helvétius. He believes that, through the spread of the principles of the French Revolution, all the major social ills will soon disappear. Perhaps he was fortunate in not living beyond 1794.
The doctrines of the French revolutionary philosophers, made less enthusiastic and much more precise, were brought to England by the philosophical radicals, of whom Bentham was the recognized chief. Bentham was, at first, almost exclusively interested in law; gradually, as he grew older, his interests widened and his opinions became more subversive. After 1808, he was a republican, a believer in the equality of women, an enemy of imperialism, and an uncompromising democrat. Some of these opinions he owed to James Mill. Both believed in the omnipotence of education. Bentham’s adoption of the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” was no doubt due to democratic feeling, but it involved opposition to the doctrine of the rights of man, which he bluntly characterized as “nonsense.”
-723-
The philosophical radicals differed from men like Helvétius and Condorcet in many ways. Temperamentally, they were patient and fond of working out their theories in practical detail. They attached great importance to economics, which they believed themselves to have developed as a science. Tendencies to enthusiasm, which existed in Bentham and John Stuart Mill, but not in Malthus or James Mill, were severely held in check by this “science,” and particularly by Malthus’s gloomy version of the theory of population, according to which most wage-earners must always, except just after a pestilence, earn the smallest amount that will keep them and their families alive. Another great difference between the Benthamites and their French predecessors was that in industrial England there was violent conflict between employers and wage-earners, which gave rise to tradeunionism and socialism. In this conflict the Benthamites, broadly speaking, sided with the employers against the working class. Their last representative, John Stuart Mill, however, gradually ceased to give adherence to his father’s stern tenets, and became, as he grew older, less and less hostile to socialism, and less and less convinced of the eternal truth of classical economics. According to his autobiography, this softening process was begun by the reading of the romantic poets.
The Benthamites, though at first revolutionary in a rather mild way, gradually ceased to be so, partly through success in converting the British government to some of their views, partly through opposition to the growing strength of socialism and trade-unionism. Men who were in revolt against tradition, as already mentioned, were of two kinds, rationalistic and romantic, though in men like Condorcet both elements were combined. The Benthamites were almost wholly rationalistic, and so were the Socialists who rebelled against them as well as against the existing economic order. This movement does not acquire a complete philosophy until we come to Marx, who will be considered in a later chapter.
The romantic form of revolt is very different from the rationalist form, though both are derived from the French Revolution and the philosophers who immediately preceded it. The romantic form is to be seen in Byron in an unphilosophical dress, but in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche it has learnt the language of philosophy. It tends to emphasize the will at the expense of the intellect, to be impatient of
-724-
chains of reasoning, and to glorify violence of certain kinds. In practical politics it is important as an ally of nationalism. In tendency, if not always in fact, it is definitely hostile to what is commonly called reason, and tends to be anti-scientific. Some of its most extreme forms are to be found among Russian anarchists, but in Russia it was the rationalist form of revolt that finally prevailed. It was Germany, always more susceptible to romanticism than any other country, that provided a governmental outlet for the anti-rational philosophy of naked will.
So far, the philosophies that we have been considering have had an inspiration which was traditional, literary, or political. But there were two other sources of philosophical opinion, namely science and machine production. The second of these began its theoretical influence with Marx, and has grown gradually more important ever since. The first has been important since the seventeenth century, but took new forms during the nineteenth century.
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin’s theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it.
The second part of Darwin’s theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best chance. Therefore among chance variations those that
